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Developing a new political thought to address today’s planetary crises

What is “planetary thinking” today? Arguing that a new approach is urgently needed, Yuk Hui develops a future-oriented mode of political thought that encompasses the unprecedented global challenges we are confronting: the rise of artificial intelligence, the ecological crisis, and intensifying geopolitical conflicts.

Machine and Sovereignty starts with three premises. The first affirms the necessity of developing a new language of coexistence that surpasses the limits of nation-states and their variations; the second recognizes that political forms, including the polis, empire, and the state, are technological phenomena, which Lewis Mumford terms “megamachines.” The third suggests that a particular political form is legitimated and rationalized by a corresponding political epistemology. The planetary thinking that this book sketches departs from the opposition between mechanism and organism, which characterized modern thought, to understand the epistemological foundations of Hegel’s political state and Schmitt’s Großraum and their particular ways of conceiving the question of sovereignty. Through this reconstruction, Hui exposes the limits of the state and reflects on a new theoretical matrix based on the interrelated concepts of biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity.

Arguing that we are facing the limit of modernity, of the eschatological view of history, of globalization, and of the human, Hui conceives necessary new epistemological and technological frameworks for understanding and rising to the crises of our present and our future.

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How Cold War computational experts invested in diplomacy, world peace, and human agency created systems that threatened democratic values.

Beginning in the 1950s, international relations experts and United States government officials built novel computer systems designed to make foreign policy knowledge and practice more scientific. Human reason, they feared, might not be enough to guarantee the survival of American democracy in a nuclear-armed world. They didn’t seek to replace humans with machines; they hoped computers would sift information or provide interactive models that analysts could use to make better decisions. But as they struggled to deliver on their ambitious goals, and as the Defense Department became more involved in their projects after the Vietnam War, their commitments to advancing knowledge, policy agency, and peace gave way to very different computing systems, ones in which correlation replaces causality and prediction replaces understanding.

In People of the Machine, Joy Rohde reveals how even the best-intentioned attempts at fostering political engagement and human autonomy evolved into an anti-democratic nightmare. Her political and intellectual history shows how the subtle and corrosive effects of technological change set the template for today’s political and conceptual regimes. Doing so reveals not just the roots of contemporary inequality and disfranchisement but how thoroughly that antihumanism has been baked into our institutions and norms. 

In any age and any given society, cultural practices reflect the material circumstances of people's everyday lives. According to Joel Dinerstein, it was no different in America between the two World Wars—an era sometimes known as the “machine age”—when innovative forms of music and dance helped a newly urbanized population cope with the increased mechanization of modern life. Grand spectacles such as the Ziegfeld Follies and the movies of Busby Berkeley captured the American ethos of mass production, with chorus girls as the cogs of these fast, flowing pleasure vehicles. 

Yet it was African American culture, Dinerstein argues, that ultimately provided the means of aesthetic adaptation to the accelerated tempo of modernity. Drawing on a legacy of engagement with and resistance to technological change, with deep roots in West African dance and music, black artists developed new cultural forms that sought to humanize machines. In “The Ballad of John Henry,” the epic toast “Shine,” and countless blues songs, African Americans first addressed the challenge of industrialization. Jazz musicians drew on the symbol of the train within this tradition to create a set of train-derived aural motifs and rhythms, harnessing mechanical power to cultural forms. Tap dance and the lindy hop brought machine aesthetics to the human body, while the new rhythm section of big band swing mimicked the industrial soundscape of northern cities. In Dinerstein's view, the capacity of these artistic innovations to replicate the inherent qualities of the machine-speed, power, repetition, flow, precision-helps explain both their enormous popularity and social function in American life.

A radical history of technology told through acts of resistance, not progress

The history of technology is often told as a history of progress, moving optimistically and inevitably from one emancipatory invention to the next. Techno-Negative turns this story on its head, taking us on a journey to the critical junctures where people have pointedly rejected and tried to undo, rather than adopt, new technologies. Beginning with Archimedes’s decision to destroy his own war machines, this book explores the will to negate technology as a deep—but persistently condemned—current in history.

As he presents a new theory of technological power, Thomas Dekeyser argues that technologies, never neutral, operate as “ontological policing,” drawing the boundaries of humanness as they are unequally leveraged by select groups. Looking beyond the Luddites to medieval monks banning tools, seventeenth-century loom burners, revolutionary lantern smashers, and computer arsonists, Dekeyser shows how people have long recognized and resisted the machine as a violent, sometimes deadly force implicated in defining who counts as human and whose lives (and ways of life) are worth saving.

Against the ubiquitous demands to reform or accelerate technological “advancement” that have failed to disrupt our present, Dekeyser proposes a spirited alternative: abolition. He challenges us to rethink the terms of our technological present and future. In a time when Big Tech grows increasingly enmeshed with authoritarian control, Techno-Negative is a conceptual declaration, and source of inspiration, for those searching for a new paradigm of technological politics.

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Born of thirteen years of field research, this interdisciplinary work explores the complex intersections of technology, class, gender, and ecology in the transnational milieu of Mexico's maquiladoras, foreign-owned assembly plants located along the U.S. border.

Devon Peña examines workplace and community struggles from the perspective of the women who work in the maquiladoras. He describes the workers' struggles for workplace democracy, social justice, and sustainable development. He also observes the circulation of struggle from the factory to the community, highlighting the efforts to establish worker-owned cooperatives in the border region during the 1970s and 1980s.

Female maquila workers are typically portrayed as passive, apolitical, and easily exploited. This book, however, presents an opposing view, investigating the "subaltern life of the shop floor"—the workers' informal methods of resistance to hazardous conditions, sexual harassment, and managerial tyranny. Using survey research, oral history, discourse analysis, and site ethnography, the author develops a cogent critique of labor-process theory, a critique grounded on his extensive study of actual workplace politics in the maquiladoras.

The Terror of the Machine is a trenchant analysis of the political, cultural, and environmental effects of maquila industrialization and an eloquent and persuasive call for alternatives in the direction of ecologically sustainable and culturally appropriate modes of development.